Times change. Up until now, I’ve been using this project as one big art- and media-fueled identity project, excavating things to throw at the caving internal void where my "identity politics" and "family history" ought to be. However, I can no longer sustain the luxury of an ongoing identity crisis. It’s time to get out of my head.
Me and the baby take long walks, past row houses and free stores, concrete and flowers and trash. "This is the world," I tell him, though I know by the time he can understand me the world will be hotter, the climate more volatile, the environment more full of microplastics. I like to imagine the baby as an adult with part park-ranger, part hacker, part MacGyver-like adaptability, able to thrive despite the climate apocalypse. Yet it occurs to me that when it comes to my creative practice, I'm somehow not creative enough to dream up work that gives life to my ideas without doing ecological harm. Unless I want to be a HUGE hypocrite, I need to figure out how to change.
So I enlist the help of two local artists who seem a lot further on that path than I am. On a balmy August night we got together over drinks. This is the gist of what was said:
Q: Would you mind introducing yourselves?
Jesse: I’m a very curious person who is just trying to figure out how to make something that makes the world make sense to me. I’m from South Jersey, like an hour outside of Philly, and I live in South Philly. My pronouns are she/hers.
Molly: I’m just gonna go with what my Lex bio says, which is “I’m a recycled textile artist.” I’m also a person outside of that…who likes swimming. I’m from Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and I live in West Philly. I use any pronouns.
Q: How’s Life?
Jesse: Life is very interesting. I have had a lot of chaotic things happen to me this year, and even just this month alone, but despite all of the chaos and all of the impostor syndrome, I think I’m showing up.
Molly: Life is really hard right now, a lot of destruction, but also life is really magical and abundant too. High highs and low lows I’d say.
Q: What kind of art do you make, and how do you use trash?
Jesse: I’m a printmaker first and foremost. I do a lot of images of “things.” I do a lot of chairs and windows and row homes. That’s iconography that I always go back to because I like thinking about the ideas of home and comfort items and things that symbolize transition in life. Since having my entire practice change up I’ve been focusing on using the materials that I have. Lately I’ve been doing some collage, using old prints that have lost their purpose or their meaning. I also have a bunch of handmade paper that I made out of leaves and denim and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was doing cardboard sculptures of row homes for a little while, inspired by this house that I moved out of this past winter that I called Mouse House. I had all these leftover supplies from moving and packing and trying to seal up all the holes in my house where all the mice were coming in, so that was really cathartic.
Molly: I make Trash Art. (laughs). TM. I like to make functional objects the most, especially ones that go on the body, or engage with the body, like furniture, shoes, clothes. Even if it’s going in a window, I still feel like it’s functional. I guess all art is functional, because it’s making you happy. Or making you something. I also make looms out of recycled materials, like bottle caps, peanut butter caps, frisbees, or anything around that size. I like to use my drill and just drill a bunch of holes and make a loom. I also use textiles, which are always scrap fabrics, so I guess it counts as trash. A lot of plastic, plastic bags, hard plastics, fishing rope, vegetable netting, fabric, twine, ribbon, really anything, everything, especially colorful stuff.
Q: Why do you use trash?
Jesse: For a while I did fall into that mindset that comes from going to art school and hanging out with people who do go to galleries and museums, thinking “I need to make art that looks like this to be a fine artist”. But by the end of my time there, it just wasn’t the thing that was making me happy. So I went back to doing what I know, which is using what I have at my disposal: repurposed or reclaimed items that I have found and repurposed, or found visually interesting and translated it into something that it reminded me of.
Molly: I didn’t feel like I could be an artist growing up, but I always did sh*t. I would take my bathing suits and cut them up and turn them into different bathing suits, and just go in my room and be like “grrr” *flex* and I’d show them to my mom and she’d be like “don’t rip your clothes up.” And then I went to college and was like, finally out of my parents wrath! My first winter term at Oberlin, I was on YouTube and found out about weaving with plastic bags and about plarn (To define “plarn”: “plastic + yarn = plarn”). I started making looms using cardboard, which, if you learn about weaving on YouTube, you’re gonna be making a cardboard loom. I made a bunch of big weavings using plarn, and I was just like “it’s over, it’s over for these h*s!” I felt like I had just cracked the code to life. I don’t know why I thought to do recycled art. I just wanted to. It’s so freaking accessible, free, queer, neurodivergent. The pedagogy — I love the word ‘pedagogy’ — of recycled materials is so freaking amazing. It asks you to play and communicate and transform, and change cultural meaning.
Q: We live in Philly, which been endearingly described as a “trash tornado” or “Filthadelphia”. How do you feel about that?
Jesse: It’s funny, coming from somewhere so close by in New Jersey that it’s essentially a Philly suburb, and then moving into the city, I remember my parents being like “Why do you want to go to Philly? It’s so dirty, and people are so mean”, and this that and the other. And I’m like, “First of all, what am I gonna do, stay in New Jersey?!” Living in the area of South Philly that I am, the neighborhood is dirty, there is that trash tornado… but I feel like the longer I live here the more I see that there’s more to it than meets the eye. There are communities that get together and work around making their areas better. My neighborhood just recently got together and had a community cleanup. So I have a lot of respect for Filthadelphia.
Molly: How I feel about it is sad. That there is trash everywhere, there is so much pollution, and it’s centered on communities that are already suffering the most from other issues that are going on in society. But there is such a cool entrepreneurial reuse culture here. People will just do weird sh*t with weird materials just like off the side of their houses. There are a bunch of amazing organizations dealing with trash in Philly. Just to name-drop a few, we’ve got Trash Academy, which is a part of Mural Arts, Rabbit Recycling is a niche recycling company, and they don’t exist many places in the US. And then there’s RAIR the recycled arts residency, and the Queer Materials Lab. Fabscrap also just moved to Philly. This is the stuff I’m a huge nerd about so I’ve found everything you can find and tried to work for every goddamn last one of them.
Q: Fine art is traditionally a luxury industry. What does it feel like to be making fine art out of trash? Do you feel like trash art belongs all the places that fine art belongs? Do you make fine art?
Molly: I make fine art. My art is fine. Trash Art deserves to be anywhere any other art is, but I don’t really care for it to be, nor am trying for it to be. I feel like I’m completely outside of that world. I have ADHD, museums are not my happy place. Even art galleries with all the hipsters, it’s like, “I’m confused.” I like things that are in the real world. Your question made me smile because trash can absolutely be so luxe and so fancy with doing very little. All you have to do is carefully deconstruct and clean it. I see the objects I work with as just beautiful objects that aren’t trash.
Jesse: I don’t think Trash Art needs to be made for the purpose of being Fine Art but I absolutely think that it is Fine Art. I don’t think it needs to be based around the material that you work in for it to be museum quality. It’s always been a very imaginative process, as opposed to something that is like “I’m going to see this thing and recreate exactly what’s in front of me”. And I feel like that’s exactly what fine art is about. It’s about that exploration, that discovery that things are maybe a little bit different than what you perceived.
Q: Lately I’ve been starting to question whether the way I make art is authentic to my lifestyle and the society we live in. My life is pretty planet-conscious and I usually enjoy things with some history to them — but when I go to make my art I feel like I need to buy new things: paint, brushes, canvas, chemicals. In my mind that sacrifice feels like a way of showing love.
But listening to you both talk about your art, even when you work with trash, it feels like you love your materials just as much.
Jesse: OH Yeah.
Molly: OH MY GOD Yeah. Literally, I’ll find something squished on the pavement, covered in dirt, and pick it up and dust it off with my fingers and shove it in my pocket and get home and place it next to my other objects. It’s like pure love and adoration. And also another thing I don’t like is art stores. It’s so f*cking expensive. Don’t find me in a Blick, I won’t be there! I like things that are free, it’s easy, you find them on the street.
Jesse: Part of why I love trash so much is the challenge of it. I was picking up pizza boxes off the side of the road to make my actual thesis for my fancy art school degree, and I hung it on the gallery walls and they were like “Are you kidding me?!” and I was like “Yeah my podium’s made out of cardboard boxes. What, I’m not gonna build a podium. Like, I had cardboard boxes and I had duct tape b*tch.” So that’s what I did. I made this with my hands, and you have to take it. It’s something that’s empowering to me.
Q: Traditionally the art world is not very planet-conscious, and there’s even a kind of old-school machismo about using toxic supplies. Do you see things changing from where you stand?
Jesse: Where I went, PAFA, even though it inches its way into the mainstream, is still a very classical institution. I think the biggest leap PAFA ever made was to use odorless spirits instead of turpentine — odorless spirits are still not good for you. The classical forms of printmaking, like etching, where you’re using full on acid baths to etch metal plates, and acetone, and especially lithography has tons of deathly chemicals. But that’s so true for so many types of artists. Every time I see an artist past 80 who still works in pastels, I’m like “you’re crazy”. Pastel dust super toxic, it gets stuck in your lungs. We still don’t know a ton of it. There are new materials coming out all the time. Acrylic paint is so new, we have no idea of the longterm impacts of it, we don’t know how conservation is going to be for it, and that’s just another instance of plastic making its way into the mainstream. I don’t know what the future holds for environmentally conscious art supplies, other than just trash. I would love to know. I should look that up.
Q: Do you think artists specifically have a role in the climate crisis? Perhaps to help people imagine a different future?
Jesse: I think everybody has a role in the environmental crisis. I think it’s something that’s on everybody’s minds all the time, no matter what you do or where you are. My first experiences with repurposing materials didn’t come from an environmental concern, but I find a lot of solace in nature, and I want to be able to do my part, so as an artist I’ll do what I can. But I don’t think I necessarily hold every artist to that same belief. I don’t think every artist needs to be doing something specifically for the purpose of environmental conservation or political activism. I think all those things make their way into art whether you want them to or not, just because art is us. We are our art and our art is us. Whatever you’re making, even if it’s abstract is always a reflection of what you’re feeling and thinking about, whether that’s politics or the environment or your boyfriend just broke up with you — all of that stuff just kind of comes through.
Molly: I definitely think of my practice as being in and for the Apocalypse. The apocalypse being the one that is currently happening and the one that will continue to happen. As an artist, and I do want to push these things. I’m not a math guy, I’m not a reading guy, I just like shapes and textures and stuff like that. I can’t not think about community when I think about my art practice. I just want it to be an interactive, collaborative thing, and I just want everyone to be expressing, man!
Q: If there wasn’t an apocalypse do you think you’d still use trash?
Jesse: It’s hard to say. I think at the end of the day, I just love the challenge of changing something from what I knew it was into something different; and, no matter what material I’m working with, I’m always going to be striving to be doing that. Even if I bought a brand new tube of oil paint, I’d try to make it do something it wouldn’t usually be used for. At the end of the day maybe I made a difference, maybe not.
Molly: How would I know what life would be like if we weren’t living in an apocalypse? That would mean that life would be completely different. But I mean the act of picking something up and making something out of it… I think I would always be using found materials, [but maybe it would mean something different]. Everything is just a material from the world. Even the concept of a recycled material is silly. Everything has had a life.
References
- "Jess Prints" https://www.jesscastorprints.com/
- "@futch_plarning" https://www.instagram.com/futch_plarning/
